10 Commandments

A thin wall divides state from church

September 14, 2003|By Ira Youdovin. Rabbi Ira Youdovin is executive vice president of the Chicago Board of Rabbis.

The recent flap over a monument of the Ten Commandments in the lobby of an Alabama courthouse was not about religion or religious values. It was about religious symbols. God wasn't the issue; rather, it was a 4-foot-high, 5,280-pound block of granite.

Few issues are more critical to the preservation of America's pluralistic democracy than maintaining proper relations between religion and state. Thomas Jefferson's celebrated Wall of Separation is not nearly as high, wide or impregnable as 1st Amendment purists would like us to believe. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court begin their sessions with prayer. Military chaplains wear the uniform of their country, including rank, and are paid with government funds. "In God We Trust" is printed on our money.

The history of 1st Amendment jurisprudence is a long, winding road. The Supreme Court once upheld Sunday closing laws on purely secular grounds (Two Guys vs. McGinley 366 U.S. 582, 1961). And while there is firm judicial opposition to organized, audible prayer in public schools, millions of students are daily compelled to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which affirms this country as "one nation under God." Court decisions on issues such as holiday displays and public aid to parochial education can be inconsistent and even confusing. Yet they demonstrate the justices' intelligence and creativity in trying to balance the 1st Amendment's potentially contradictory "no establishment" and "free exercise" clauses.

Toward this end, the Supreme Court has ruled that religious symbols can stand on public property if their primary effect neither advances nor inhibits religion, does not foster an excessive entanglement of government with religion and has a compelling secular purpose. These criteria are known as the Lemon test, named for the 1971 decision (Lemon vs. Kurtzman) by which they were established.

Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore could have found a constitutionally acceptable way to display the 10 Commandments. The Supreme Court building in Washington has a frieze on its east portico that includes Moses holding two tablets, depicted among those who have handed down legal codes upon which human society is built.

Moore could also have placed the monument in a less conspicuous location within the building, as suggested by the federal court that rejected his appeal.

But Moore had other objectives in mind when he made secret arrangements to bring the monument into his courthouse in the dead of night. Placed in a main passageway, with the King James text chiseled into stone tablets and 14 quotations about God around its base, there was little question that the monument would flunk Lemon.

Indeed, Moore has made it abundantly clear that his purpose was to advance religion. The monument, he said, "marks the beginning of the restoration of the moral foundation of law to our people and a return to the knowledge of God in our land."

Rhetoric of this genre ignites passion. Thousands of people surrounded the courthouse for a week in what one observer described as "part revival meeting, part siege." T-shirts proclaimed, "I'm here for God." The demonstrators remained peaceful, although their words revealed groundless apocalyptic fears fueled by a profound misunderstanding of what was at stake. Rev. Patrick Mahoney, director of the Christian Defense Coalition, vowed to "call everybody we know and tell them to come to Montgomery and look inside an empty building and see what's ahead for America." One youngster asked a reporter, "Will they take our Bibles next?"

Shelby Foote, an astute Southern historian, observed that Moore cleverly manipulated the mood: "He made it sound like he stood for God and everybody who opposed him was against God."

That is patently absurd. God's presence is manifest in courtrooms throughout this land, and in every sphere of American civic life, not by symbols, but by just decisions, moral courage and acts of kindness, great and small. God's work is done by believers who are guided by Holy Writ, and by atheists and agnostics whose ethics derive from values of a secular American culture whose roots are planted in the religious traditions of its people. In a recent op-ed piece appearing in this newspaper, Joseph Loconte, a commentator for National Public Radio and a fellow in religion at the Heritage Foundation, wrote, "As the founders conceived it, democracy depends on citizens with virtue, and virtue typically grows out of religious convictions. The early consensus was clear: The rule of law would collapse without the support of religious ideals."

When one examines the great social movements that have shaped our nation--the struggle against slavery and for civil rights, the Great Society, decisions to wage wars or end them, pro-life vs. pro-choice, and dozens of others--one is struck by the central and powerful role played by religion and its leaders.